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How do "good intentions" pave the road for empire? Whether it is iatrogenic violence, voluntourism, the misappropriation of gay rights, or NGOs serving as the Trojan Horses of US dominance and neoliberal social reengineering, contributors to this volume expose and analyze the many ways in which the new imperialism involves partitioning the world into tutors and wards, saviours and victims. Underlying the seduction of imperial elite-lore are established modes of socialization and enculturation, ranging from the elaborate and persistent demonization of chief opponents of US empire to the lionization of military actors commonly rendered as heroes. Also scrutinized in this volume are the domestic social and political costs, reaching as far as the displacement of urban populations to make way for the expansion of the informatic industries of empire, paving the way for the unprecedented dominance of corporations in our daily lives.
The Kingdom of Champassak was founded in 1713 in what is now southern Laos, and its royal lineage, the House of Champassak, continues to the present. In this historical study of Champassak, Ian G. Baird explores the ways it has asserted its sovereignty across time and through monumental historical shifts, including the delineation of national boundaries for Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In re-creating this story, Baird draws not only on a dazzling variety of primary sources in English, French, Lao, and Thai but also on many years spent in conversation with members of the Na Champassak family, who are now spread across a wide geographical area, from Laos and Thailand to France and the United States. Each chapter treats one historical period, identifying the Champassak approach to sovereignty during that time. Through this deep history, Baird shows how sovereign power, even within one case, takes a wide range of forms, always contingent, contested, and uneven across space and time.
The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. The Longest Journey, spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.
In this concise and compelling history, Cambodia's past is described in vivid detail, from the richness of the Angkorean empire through the dark ages of the 18th and early-19th centuries, French colonialism, independence, the Vietnamese conflict, the Pol Pot regime, and its current incarnation as a troubled democracy. With energetic writing and passion for the subject, John Tully covers the full sweep of Cambodian history, explaining why this land of contrasts remains an interesting enigma to the international community. Detailing the depressing record of war, famine, and invasion that ha.
Based on largely unexploited archival sources, France on the Mekong is the first comprehensive history of the colonial era in Cambodia. The book takes as its point of departure Marx's early appraisal of colonialism's "double mission" in Asia. Tully argues that King Norodom's decision to invite in the French in 1863 was a "Faustian bargain" for Cambodia. While the Protectorate did ensure the continued existence of the Cambodian state, and did much to preserve Cambodia's crumbling cultural legacy, the downside was that authoritarian rule was entrenched rather than weakened, and that the country was left seriously underdeveloped when the French left in 1953. Colonialism disturbed the foundations of traditional society, but did not replace them. This was to have disastrous consequences for post-colonial Cambodia- a point that the author develops at the end of the book.
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